Mrs Harris, MP Page 9

  This brought extravagant shushes down upon her from all quarters and dark looks and the man next to her turned and peered with an expression of incredulous astonishment as though he had some strange creature under a microscope. Yet there was too much excitement, too much beauty surrounding her, too much wonder to be found in the great vaulted Hall with its massive carvings and paintings, for her to be intimidated. It was an historic day which she would not forget as long as she lived.

  Nevertheless it was with a certain sense of relief that she returned once more to the peace and comfortable security of Willis Gardens and the people who spoke her own language.

  Naturally, Mrs Butterfield and several of the neighbours were there to hear about it all, and Bayswater too came to felicitate her, bringing her a bunch of flowers obviously off a barrow, for their heads were already drooping. Ada Harris then had her first real opportunity to thank the dignified chauffeur for the part he had played in winning adherents to her. She terrified him by threatening to kiss him.

  ‘It wasn’t anything,’ Bayswater assured her. ‘When we found out what they were up – I mean, we felt we had to do something –’

  For some reason that Mrs Harris could not fathom, Bayswater had become red and flustered far beyond what even the fear of an embrace seemed to call for and he finally extricated himself with, ‘It was a most enjoyable experience, and many of us were enabled to meet a number of very fine people whose acquaintance we shall continue to enjoy. You don’t know how many friends you’ve got in this neighbourhood, Ada.’

  ‘That I do,’ said Mrs Harris, and she gazed around at those in the room, particularly searching out Mrs Butterfield whom she saw regarding her in the most peculiar manner, as though she had suddenly become a stranger – a stranger on a pedestal. Violet Butterfield had never been one for subtleties of expression and the look that Ada Harris caught on her face was one of simple, bovine adulation.

  In their long relationship, Mrs Butterfield had always deferred to her friend who, with her sharp mind and executive capabilities, was the leader. But this was something different and just that bit too much to be comfortable.

  ‘Did you make a speech, Ada? Did you tell ’em?’ Violet asked.

  Mrs Harris forced a laugh. ‘Not yet, Vi! There’ll be plenty of time. It was the Queen’s turn today.’ The reason the laugh was strained was because Mrs Harris suddenly realized that this was the question she would be enduring endlessly from Mrs Butterfield and soon she would not be able to hear it without experiencing moments of irritation. All over again it was herself as a child, coming home from a treat or a party, and her parents reiterating, ‘Come on, tell us what it was like.’

  She was remembering something Mrs Butterfield had said. ‘Oh, Ada, you’ll get so ’igh and mighty, I’ll be losing the best friend I ever ’ad.’ Was this sudden feeling of exasperation and impatience a symptom already of growing ’igh and mighty? And who would be losing whose best friend? Mrs Harris thought that if anything ever came between her and Mrs Butterfield, she would not be able to bear it. And yet something, minute though it might be, already had. And why had Bayswater ever since her election been looking so grim and out of sorts? The end of an exciting day was somewhat less than satisfactory.

  12

  But there were further shocks and ceremonies and surprises awaiting her when now a recognized Member (the policeman at the door remembered and touched his helmet to her) she returned next day to the House of Commons as the newest and most timid of arrivals.

  For here at last she found herself close to and a part of a mystery which up to then had been contemplated only from afar. She was now brought into immediate contact with the difference between a faceless, placeless Government that one knew only as ‘they’, or ‘them’, and an active, vital body consisting of hundreds of men and not a few women milling about, the great majority of them as familiar with this warren as with their own homes. The very dynamism of it was shaking.

  It was almost, she felt, like her initial contact with the Higher Power, a Being and an Entity of which she was never quite sure in her own mind, but she remembered from the first time she was taken to church as a child that everything about it seemed calculated to instil not only reverence but dread.

  So too it was with the House of Commons, its black-robed, white-wigged clerks at the table, the majestic figure of the Speaker in black court dress beneath robes and peruke.

  She trembled when she was called upon in turn to take the oath of allegiance and her voice shook as she repeated, ‘I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors, according to law, so help me, God.’

  When she had thus given the response, the Speaker had shaken hands with her, but she had hardly dared look into the majesty of his countenance. Then a roll of parchment, the ‘Test Roll’, was put before her and a pen thrust into her hand. She signed ‘Ada Harris’ and became herself a part of history.

  The taking of the oath had had a sobering, almost chilling effect upon her. From the moment she had sworn loyalty and duty – and no member, no matter how long in Parliament was exempt from the renewal of this swearing – she felt as though an unexpectedly heavy mantle of responsibility had descended on to her shoulders. Her brash and treacherous imagination had visualized her as a leader and a crusader, telling off the world. Now she was also being called upon to serve. She knew herself to be ignorant as yet of the nature of the service and for the first time found herself fearful of her ability to render it. She had lost her identity for the moment. She was no longer wholly an individual but part of a body.

  The last of the business of reopening the Parliament was finished. The leader of the winning Party had become Prime Minister and had formed an acceptable government. The House of Commons settled down to its routine of work and as the days turned into weeks, Ada Harris found herself lost, lonely, isolated and trying to grope her way through darkness that seemed to grow more impenetrable as time went on.

  Her misery at that early stage was two-fold, first because she was unable to make head or tail of what was going on, or find her way through the maze of parliamentary procedure, and secondly, even more distressing, she was being made aware that not only was she a useless freshman member of the House from the most minority of parties but an unpopular one at that. There was a distinct atmosphere of hostility towards her.

  Nor was it snob. There were other Members of the House who dropped their aitches, or in one way or another gave proof of origins even more humble than hers. But they were accepted, had friends and were listened to respectfully. The feelings that seemed to be arrayed against her were something she could not seem to catch. She did understand the basic battle lines drawn between the two major Parties and the squeeze in which the sparse members of the Centre found themselves, but she discovered soon that she was something of a pariah even amongst those of her own fellowship.

  For the Centre Party had been thrown into a state of confusion having polled only five seats, three less than they had before. The failure to capture Fairford Cross had let the wind out of the planned resurgence and they were inclined to blame Mrs Harris for it all. What little power they wielded was to be wooed occasionally for votes when a close division was in prospect and so they simply ignored her and her abortive attempts to win their co-operation in ‘passing a law’.

  Conservative Members felt they had been double-crossed; most of those on the Labour side regarded her as a traitor to her class and would have nothing to do with her. The Liberals had troubles of their own.

  Of course it was not all like that and from time to time one or two friendly overtures were made in her direction, as, for instance, when a seventy-year-old veteran of the House, a grizzled political campaigner and Honourable Member from a Norfolk constituency, stopped her in the lobby and said abruptly with an outward fierceness to cover an inward gentleness, ‘How are you getting on?’

  Mrs Harris was so startled that she replied
, ‘Not very well, I’m afraid …’ and then added, ‘… sir.’

  The veteran Member replied, ‘Don’t you “sir” me! I followed your campaign. It was damned good. Never you mind. It took me a year or so before I really knew my way around.’

  And once at tea-time, Mrs Harris found herself in the restaurant at a table with three Labour Members, one of them an enormously obese woman – fatter even than Mrs Butterfield – who was from a constituency in Wolverhampton. They addressed not a word to Mrs Harris, chatting amongst themselves as though she were not there. But when the two others had finished and left, the stout woman remained seated and after looking about her cautiously, she leaned across the table and said, ‘You’re Mrs Harris,’ in a half whisper. ‘I shouldn’t dare to say so, but I think you’re wonderful and I agree with many of the things you said. If we had campaigned along your lines and thought more about what’s to become of people, we would have done a great deal better ourselves.’

  And there were several others, too, who sometimes spoke to her in a cheerful enough manner, asking her opinion on some matter being debated. But by and large she was made to feel an interloper. She was also aware that often when she was able to scramble a place for herself on one of the back benches, the seats on either side of her were mysteriously vacant.

  ‘What ’ave I got?’ Ada Harris asked herself. ‘Some disease? What’s ’appened?’

  Only a few weeks ago the entire country had been up in arms for her because some dastardly Frenchman had dared to cast aspersions upon the fact that she had once earned her living honourably with dust-pan, mop and broom. But isolated as she was, alone and friendless in this august body she had no way of finding out or even guessing that the House was offended.

  For the ancient House of Commons, although it consisted of some six hundred and thirty diverse members, had a personality of its own which to those who belonged often appeared moody and stubborn. They thought of the House as ‘she’ and feminine. ‘She’ had a typically feminine sense of humour in that she would enjoy jokes at the expense of others, particularly when Members slanged one another or loosed barbed arrows of linguistic wit, but not at the expense of herself. Above all she did not like to be made a fool of. The manner in which Mrs Harris had been elected was a bad joke and the House had been made to look slightly ridiculous.

  As it was inevitable that it must, the story of the plot that had failed had leaked out and in one conversation or another it reached practically every ear naturally, of course, excluding that of Ada Harris. The very benches, the rafters and the ceiling of the chamber, not to mention the restaurant, the smoking-room, the library and the rooms opening off the mazes without, seemed to have absorbed the Members’ reaction to the strange and accidental election of a candidate who should never have been there.

  Very well, so the matter had backfired on to those who had contrived the plot and they had been punished. Still, the House did not appreciate this kind of jesting.

  Thus, she found herself swept away, a lonely piece of flotsam, storm-tossed in an angry sea. She tried to understand the business that was being conducted, the debates that raged, the questions that were asked. When the division bell rang, she voted, often not knowing what for, or on which side, or why, which only increased the ire and contempt of those arrayed against her. Once, through sheer ignorance, she committed the most unpardonable breach of all.

  Some harried Member in a rush, and obviously taking her for someone else, had dashed up asking, ‘Pair, tonight?’ And when she nodded, thinking she had been asked whether she would be ‘Here tonight?’, he had vanished satisfied. She had indeed been there that night, and voted without ever knowing that she had broken a cardinal, unwritten rule by which two Members of opposite affiliations agree to stay away from the session, thus neutralizing their votes. To welsh on a pairing was considered by the House as worse form than beating a fox to death with a cosh, or chasing a mother pheasant up a tree and then bringing her down with a telescopic rifle.

  Added to all of which was the worst loneliness that Mrs Harris had experienced since the time, many years before, when she had lost her husband. For the normal hours of Parliament sittings were fixed from 2.30 to 10.30 p.m., Mondays to Thursdays, with a Friday session from eleven in the morning to four-thirty in the afternoon.

  But it was rare that the House did not remain convened much longer, sometimes to well past midnight. Mrs Harris learned that Members of Parliament could have very little social life. This meant that not only were the tea-and-telly sessions out of the window, but her nightly get-together with Mrs Butterfield as well.

  And even though her weekends were free, Mrs Harris discovered that she had suddenly become shy of contact with those whom she had known, associated with and loved for so long. She was perpetually worried that Mrs Butterfield or some neighbour would ask her what was happening in the House of Commons, what she had done that day or that week. Worst of all, they might have wished to know how the promised utopia of ‘Live and Let Live’ was getting on and when its effects might become noticeable. And to this she had no answer at all.

  The two-edged sword of celebrity was inflicting its usual wounds, though it had not turned out quite as Violet Butterfield had predicted. It wasn’t that Mrs Harris was getting too grand for her friends, but rather that she was becoming too miserable and frightened to inflict herself upon them.

  But the most upsetting revelation suffered by Ada Harris, MP, was arrived at as the result of her own sharp wits and observations. It did not take long for her to make the discovery that perhaps this time she had badly over-reached herself. For it soon became obvious that outside of intelligence and the native shrewdness she had acquired down the years of battling the wolf scratching at the threshold, she had not a single qualification to enable her to add the title ‘Member of Parliament’ after her name.

  Ada Harris – char. None better or more in demand. Ada Harris – nanny: for children loved her and she got on well with them. Ada Harris – matrimonial adviser. She had saved many a marriage by calming the hysterics and talking plain sense to betrayed wives who had encountered lipstick the wrong colour on the collars or pocket handkerchiefs of their husbands.

  ‘’E’ll love you all the more afterwards, dearie, if you pretend you don’t know nuffink and don’t make a stink,’ she would say, bolstering her theories with appropriate arguments and examples, with the result that those who listened to her were now still happily married or well-to-do widows, sitting on the lolly, while those who put up a stink were not.

  But Mrs Harris – MP?

  In the House she found herself surrounded by people of education and experience. This was quite different from merely people of culture, whose speech and position in the economic system differed from hers and with whom she had always been able to cope on her own level. What her fellow Members of the Mother of Parliaments seemed to have at their fingertips was information and knowledge.

  The old warhorses of Labour, the ex-Trade Union leaders, who had come up from the mines, the railways, the factories or the sweat shops, had facts and figures and ready references at their command and seemed to know what they were talking about.

  A single glimpse behind the curtain of modern national economy, bewildering and mostly unintelligible though it might have been, was sufficient to make plain her colossal ignorance, not to mention helplessness in the face of a Government that ran the country by spending what it had not got and borrowing what it would never live to pay. The mirage of ‘Live and Let Live’ was dispelled overnight, as it were.

  All who rose to speak had sheafs of notes in their hands, reserves in briefcases as well as more apparently inside his or her head, references to laws past and present, reports, comment, statistics and facts and figures of every kind to support their arguments, or demolish those of an opponent. Each was learned or experienced in something, apparently, and if one or two of them might be bluffing, as indeed shrewd Ada judged they were, just as in the long ago she had penetrated the Ho
n. Ronald Puckle, at least they had at their fingertips the wherewithal to sustain their bluffs. Mrs Harris had nothing.

  Lifemanship and the achievement of survival was not enough in this consilium. More was required if you were to set yourself up as the representative and spokesman for a large number of your fellow citizens. With an increasing feeling of desolation gnawing at her vitals each day, each hour, each minute, Mrs Harris came to the unhappy appreciation that she had forced herself into the midst of a battlefield and the thick of the fight naked and unarmed.

  ‘Parliament ain’t for the likes of us,’ had been the doom-ridden cry of Violet Butterfield, and for the first time since Mrs Harris had known her friend with her everlasting prophecies of catastrophe, she was right. The doom she had foreseen was upon Ada Harris. The Parliament of Great Britain was not for the likes of her. More was wanted than she had to give.

  And inevitably she began to ask herself however she had got there in the first place?

  Looking back over the sequence of events for the first time from some distance, a good deal of what had happened and was happening began to appear very odd indeed. On the surface it seemed her haranguing of Sir Wilmot that morning had led him to the idea of her candidacy in a doubtful district. But from that moment on powerful forces, controlled by no one visible, had been at work to bring about a result that apparently had made no one happy, including Sir Wilmot who had started it all. He had not so much as sent her a telegram of felicitation before vanishing amongst the Greek Isles.

  Why the snickers and glances she sometimes caught, or conversations broken off abruptly as she came within range? And why was her own Party baulking her at every turn? She had made, and they had endorsed during the campaign, promises of parity of prices v. wages. They had enrolled under her proud banner of ‘Live and Let Live’. Now they would not even speak with her.